“these drawings were created as part of a larger body of work, dealing with john glenn’s first transmission from space, all under the title of “transmissions”. for the drawings, i combined the vowel structure of glenn’s text with rimbaud’s color/vowel equivalents, in order to generate a score for mark making and color sequences.
glenn’s text begins with: “i am in the middle”, and the vowel structure of that phrase determined the following beginning of the drawing: “i (red/9), a (black/1), i (red/9), e (white/5), i (red/9), e (white/5).
while this seems like a rigid way of working, the actual application of these rules is very intuitive – with most of the drawing being made through intuitive responses to visual object as it evolves – and a red pencil and the number nine can evoke a ton of responses – such as which red? or what can a 9 suggest: 9 dashes, a 9 inch line, 9 circles, a circle with a 9″ circumference, etc. ?
each drawing was done with colored pencil, and is 22″ x 30″